The issue will go back to court on August 10, when the sides will discuss whether a preliminary injunction is needed.

The whole matter was almost settled in 2013 when the Obama administration originally stopped Wilson from putting his plans online with a lawsuit. After years of back and forth, the federal case against the virtual arms merchant seemed like a slam dunk. Then Donald Trump came into office and not only stopped the suit but paid Wilson $40,000 in damages.

So the question remains – why would any sane human being want to post a do-it-yourself gun kit on the Internet where any criminal, psychotic or violent fanatic could easily access it?

Wilson says he’s not in it for financial gain. He wants to make a political point – to flood the world with so many cheap, untraceable guns that the idea of passing any kind of regulations on them would be impossible.

“All this Parkland stuff, the students, all these dreams of ‘common sense gun reforms’? No. The Internet will serve guns, the gun is downloadable. No amount of petitions or die-ins or anything else can change that.”

Not only that, but the owner and founder of Defense Distributed, an Austin, Texas, based start up that pretends to be a nonprofit organization, says he is prepared to kill police and federal agents if the courts don’t continue seeing things his way.

In the same Wired interview, he says he wasn’t expecting support from the Trump administration. He expected Hillary Clinton would win the White House in 2016 and that she would continue to oppose his 3D printed firearms.

“If that happened, as Wilson tells it, he was ready to launch his [3D printed gun] repository, regardless of the outcome of his lawsuit, and then defend it in an armed standoff. “I’d call a militia out to defend the server, Bundy-style,” Wilson says calmly, in the first overt mention of planned armed violence I’ve ever heard him make. “Our only option was to build an infrastructure where we had one final suicidal mission, where we dumped everything into the Internet,” Wilson says.”

So let’s be clear about one thing – the guy pushing for 3D printed firearms is literally a terrorist imitator.

He is an American extremist. He is to us as Osama bin Laden is to mainstream Muslims.

Or at least he wants to be that.

While we’re rounding up brown people and separating them from their children without any workable plan to reunite them on this or that side of the border, we have a US citizen making terroristic threats with the means to carry them out and he’s walking around free.

It’s hard to make a 3D-printed gun. You need an expensive, top-of-the-line 3D printer and some knowledge of how to work it. And even then the result is a shoddy firearm at best. It may only fire a few bullets before falling apart.

A shooter would have to work extra hard to accomplish his goal with Wilson’s design. It would be much easier to use one of the billions of firearms already available – and much more deadly.

Moreover, technology is always advancing – 3D printers will probably be able to create stronger and more deadly firearms in time. With these sorts of designs readily available, it is easy to imagine a school shooter accessing a device in a tech or computer lab and creating a weapon of mass destruction. He wouldn’t set off any alarms because he wouldn’t have the gun when he entered the building. He’d make it in school.

Some shrug at these dangers saying that they’re inevitable.

Even if we stop Wilson, these sorts of designs will eventually be available in some form on-line. That’s the double-edged sword of mass media – all information is available including easy ways to kill a large number of people.

However, I think this is a cop-out.

For instance, the Internet and computer technology make it fairly easy to mass produce currency as well as firearms. In fact, it’s theoretically much easier.

Yet we don’t see a major influx of counterfeit bills. The reason? Business and industry have collaborated with government to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Programs like Adobe Photoshop include software that restrict the printing of your own money. We could do the same with future 3D printers. We could recall those already in service and retrofit them with such code.

Oh, sure not everyone will comply. There will always be someone who breaks through the safety net. But if all we can do is greatly reduce the spread of 3D-printed firearms, that doesn’t make it futile.

That’s less than two years in jail for defrauding tens of thousands of students and multiple districts across the Commonwealth.

In addition, once he serves his time he’ll be on probation for 3 years.

And even though there is no mystery about the amount of money he defrauded from the Internal Revenue Service by shifting his income to the tax returns of others – $437,632, to be exact – the amount he’ll have to pay back in restitution is yet to be determined.

One would think that’s easy math. You stole $437,632, you need to pay back at least that amount – with interest!

And what of the $8 million? Though I can’t find a single explicit reference to what happened to it in the media, it is implied that the money was recovered and returned to Pa Cyber.

Yet there seems to be no discussion of a financial penalty for embezzling all that money. If my checking account dips below a certain balance, I’m penalized. If I don’t pay the minimum on my credit cards, I’m charged an additional fee. Yet this chucklehead pilfers $8 million and won’t be docked a dime!? Just paying it back is good enough!?

But what makes this sentence even more infuriating to me is the paltry jail time Trombetta will serve.

They each got three years in prison, seven years probation, $10,000 in fines and 2,000 hours of community service.

So in America, cheating on standardized tests gets you a harder sentence than embezzling a fortune from school kids.

I’m not saying what the Atlanta teachers and administrators did was right, but their crime pales in comparison to Trombetta’s.

Think about it.

Atlanta city schools have suffered under decades of financial neglect. The kids – many of whom are students of color – receive fewer resources, have more narrowed curriculum and are forced to live under the yoke of generational poverty.

Yet their teachers were told to increase test scores with little to no help, and if they didn’t, they’d be fired.

I can’t imagine why they tried to cheat a system as fair as that.

It’s like being mugged at gunpoint and then the judge convicts you of giving your robber a wooden nickel.

The worst part of all of this is that we haven’t learned anything from either case.

High stakes standardized testing has become entrenched in our public schools by the newly passed federal law – the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

And though Trombetta resigned from his post as CEO of PA Cyber in September 2013, cyber charters are as popular as ever.

You can’t turn on the TV without a commercial for a cyber charter school showing up. You can’t drive through a poor neighborhood without a billboard advertising a virtual charter. They even have ads on the buggies at the grocery store!

Yet these schools have a demonstrated track record of failure even when compared to brick-and-mortar charter schools. And when you compare them to traditional public schools, it’s like comparing a piece of chewed up gum on the bottom of your shoe to a prime cut of filet mignon.

That means cyber charters provide less math instruction than not going to school at all.

When it comes to reading, the same study found cyber charters provide 72 days less instruction than traditional public schools.

That’s like skipping 40% of the school year!

And this isn’t just at one or two cyber charters. Researchers noted that 88 percent of cyber charter schools produce weaker academic growth than similar brick and mortar schools.

They concluded that these schools have an “overwhelming negative impact” on students.

AND THAT’S ALL LEGAL!

In Pennsylvania, nearly 35,100 of the 1.7 million children attending public schools are enrolled in cyber-charter schools. With more than 11,000 students, PA Cyber is by far the largest of the state’s 16 such schools.

If Trombetta had just stiffed Pennsylvania’s students that much, he wouldn’t have been in any trouble with the law.

However, he got even greedier than that!

He needed more, More, MORE!

Justice – such as it is in this case – was a long time coming.

Trombetta was first indicted back in 2013 – five years ago.

He was facing 11 counts of mail fraud, theft or bribery, conspiracy and tax offenses related to his involvement in entities that did business with Pa. Cyber. He pleaded guilty to tax conspiracy almost two years ago, acknowledging that he siphoned off $8 million from The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School.

He has been free on bond all this time.

His sister, Elaine Trombetta, agreed to cooperate with prosecution, according to federal court filings. She pleaded guilty in October 2013 to filing a false individual income tax return on her brother’s behalf and has yet to be sentenced.

It was only yesterday that her brother – the kingpin of this conspiracy – was ultimately sentenced.

This summer I sat down with my 9-year-old daughter and together we played the most popular Nintendo Switch game for hours, days, weeks.

And at the end of all that time, I came away victorious – something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do when I started.

There are so many buttons to learn, two joy sticks, various info screens and menus.

But when it was all over, I had cleared all four divine beasts. I got all 18 captured memories. I completed about 80 shrines. I mastered about 45 side quests. I shredded guardians, lynols and bokoblins. And, yes, I opened a major can of whoop ass on Calamity Gannon.

As the kids say, I’m jelly.

My video game skills are lit.

You can’t handle me, bro.

And so on.

But I’m not a kid. I’m a grown man.

Didn’t I have anything better to do?

Couldn’t I have found a more productive use for all that time?

Maybe. Maybe not. However, beyond the sheer fun, I did learn something from the whole experience.

As a public school teacher, I learned about my students by following in their footsteps.

That’s really why I started playing in the first place – my middle school kids this year loved that game.

I got more Zelda doodles, more Hyrule poetry, more Link fan fiction than you might at first believe.

The world of the game was really important to my children and having even a passing knowledge of that world helped me relate to them.

I even asked for a few tips after class.

One of my best students took her Switch out of her backpack and showed me a prime location to pick hot peppers so I could withstand the cold of Mount Hyrule (Don’t ask).

Or they could show why ed tech will never be as effective at teaching as flesh and blood instructors.

In any case, here is what I learned.

1) Focus on Fun

One of the biggest differences between ed tech and “Zelda” was the focus.

The games we make children play at school are designed to teach them something. That is their purpose. It is their raison d’être. The point behind the entire activity is to instruct, test and reward.

By contrast, the purpose of “Zelda” is fun.

Don’t get me wrong. “Zelda” can be very educational.

There are points where the game is actively trying to teach you how to do things usually associated with game play.

You have to learn how to make your character (Link) do what you want him to do. You have to learn how to manipulate him through the world. How to run, how to climb, how to heal, how to use weapons, how to cook and make elixirs, etc.

However, the point behind the entire game is not instructional. It’s fun – pure and simple.

If you have to learn something, it is all in service to that larger goal.

In the world of the game, learning is explicitly extrinsic. It helps you have more fun playing. Only the pursuit of winning is intrinsic or even conceptualized as being so.

In real life, this may not be the right approach to education, but it seems to be a rule of virtual experience. If it is superseded, the game becomes just another class assignment – lifeless, dead, boring.

If educational software is going to be effective in the classroom, it must find a way to bridge this divide. It must either put fun before pedagogy or trick the user into thinking it has done so.

I’m not sure this is possible or desirable. But there it is.

2) Logic and Problem Solving Work but not Curriculum

There are many aspects of “Zelda” one could consider educational.

However, when it comes to things that have importance outside of the game, the biggest would be problem solving and logic games.

A great deal of game play can be characterized under this umbrella.

The ostensible mission is to defeat the bad guy, Calamity Gannon. However, to do so you often have to solve various puzzles in order to have the strength and skills to take him down.

The most obvious of these puzzles are shrines. There are 120 special areas throughout Hyrule that Link needs to find and solve.

Each one involves a special skill and asks the gamer to decipher problems using that skill. For example, one asks you to manipulate fans so that the air flow makes windmills turn in a pattern. Another asks you to get a ball through an obstacle course.

In each case, the emphasis is on logic and critical thinking.

That has tremendous educational value. And it’s something I’ve seen done easily and well in many educational video games.

The problem is it doesn’t teach any particular curriculum. It doesn’t teach math, science, English or social studies – though it does help contribute to all of these pursuits.

Ed tech games are not nearly so coy. They often try to go right for the curriculum with disastrous results. Ed tech software, for instance, will have you find the grammatical error in a sentence or solve an equation in order to move on in the game.

That just doesn’t work. It feels false, extraneous and forced. It’s doesn’t seem like an organic part of the experience. It’s something contrived onto it from outside and reminds the gamer exactly why you’re playing – to learn.

3) Option to Seek Help

One of the most surprising things to me about playing “Zelda” on the Switch was how much of an on-line gaming community has formed around the whole experience.

If you get stuck in a particular area, you can find numerous sites on-line that will help you get passed it. You can even find gamer videos where YouTubers will show you exactly how they solved this or that problem. And they don’t all have the same solution. Some provide elegant, well-detailed advice, and others seem to stumble on it and offer you their videos as proof they could actually get the job done somehow.

It’s a lot different from when I was a kid playing video games. Back then (30 years ago) you had your friends but there were few other places to go for help. There were fan magazines and a few video game companies had tip hotlines. But other than that, you were on your own.

One of my favorite YouTubers this summer was Hyrule Dude. His videos were clear, informative and helpful. However, I didn’t always agree with his solutions. But they invariably helped me find things that would work for me.

It reminded me a bit of Khan Academy and other learning sites.

If kids really want to grasp something today, they have so many places they can go on-line. As educators, it’s hard to incorporate them into a classroom environment because there are certain things we want kids to find out for themselves.

For instance, as a language arts teacher, I want my students to do the assigned readings on their own. Yet I know some of them try to skip to the on-line summaries they can find and use that instead of reading the text. I have no problem if they access good summaries and analysis but I don’t want them to take the place of trying to comprehend the text on their own first.

I think there are ways to use this larger social media community to help support learning without spoiling the hard work kids need to put in on their own. But it’s something we need to think about more and find better ways to incorporate.

4) Open Ended

One of the most striking things about this new “Zelda” is how much choice the gamer has. In most games you have to complete the first board and then the second and so on until you win.

On the Switch, the world you’re thrust into is incredibly open ended. You can do pretty much what you want, when you want. Or at least you can try.

At first, your character is limited to one area of the world – a plateau. But once you complete a certain number of the challenges there, you get the paraglider which allows you to access most of the rest of the world.

It’s a huge area to explore – impossible to travel the entire length of it without spending hours of game play. And it’s entirely up to you where to go and what to do next.

The central mission of the game is to defeat Calamity Gannon in Hyrule Castle. However, that would be incredibly difficult early on. You’re advised to get the four Divine Beasts first. And you can do them in any order you want.

Moreover, I mentioned shrines earlier. When you complete four shrines, you can either increase your hearts (the amount you can be hurt without dying) or your stamina (how long your character can do something hard like climbing or swimming without having to rest). Technically, you don’t have to complete more than a few shrines, but doing so makes your character stronger and better able to get the Divine Beasts and defeat Gannon.

There are also side-quests (totally optional) that reward your character with money, items, etc.

Ed tech software is exactly the opposite. You must do section A before section B before section C. It’s little more than a multiple choice test with only limited possible answers of which only one is correct.

In “Zelda” there are often multiple ways to achieve the same end. For instance, I would assume the programmers wanted me to fight my way through every room of Hyrule Castle to get to Calamity Gannon. However, I simply climbed over the walls and swan through the moats – a much quicker and efficient method.

If we could recreate this freedom of movement and multifarious solutions within educational software, we might really be onto something. But, frankly, it’s something that even traditional video games have difficulty being able to recreate.

5) Choice to Play or Not

And speaking of choice, there is the choice whether to play or not.

Video games are one of the things kids choose for leisure. When we force kids to play them in school, that choice is gone.

They become a task, a trial, an assignment.

Moreover, not every child enjoys video games.

We can’t mandate kids learn from games – even the best of ed tech games. At best, they should be an option. They could be one tool in the toolbox.

In summary, I think the goal of the ed tech industry is deeply flawed.

To do so, games would have to primarily be focused on fun – not learning. They would have to be organized around critical thinking and logic – not curriculum. They would need to utilize the on-line community for help but not cheating. They would need to be open ended worlds and not simply repackaged standardized testing. And finally, students would need the choice whether to play them or not.

Cheaper commodities are better – especially when the consumer isn’t the student forced to play the game but the politician or administrator in charge of school policy.

Ed tech’s potential as a positive tool in a school’s toolbox has been smothered by the needs of business and industry. Until we recognize the harm corporations do in the school, we will be doomed to dehumanizing students, devaluing teachers and wasting our limited resources on already wealthy big business.

Normally, the federal, state and local government collect taxes to fund an individual child’s education, which is then spent at a public or charter school.

At a public school all that money must be spent on the student. At a charter school some of that money can be pocketed as profit by the private company who runs the school.

Public schools provide a better alternative because the funding must be dedicated to the student, living within a district’s coverage area guarantees enrollment, the school must be managed by an elected school board with open meetings and a plethora of other amenities you won’t find at a privatized institution. But at least the charter school is a school!

However, an ESA or other voucher would allow that money to go elsewhere. It could go to funding the tuition at a private or parochial school where organizers can use it however they like – pocketing some and using the rest to help the child as you’ll find in most charter schools.

Reading a book or an article gives you a badge. Answering a series of multiple-choice questions on a reading earns you more badges. And if you’ve completed a certain task satisfactorily, you can even earn a badge by teaching that same material to others.

It’s the low wage gig economy applied to education. We just transform a crappy job market where workers bounce from a few hours of minimum wage labor here to a few hours of minimum wage toil there – all without benefits or union protections – into learning. Children bouncing from a few hours of Khan Academy videos here to a software package there and Voila! “Modern” education!

It is only the poor and middle class who will be released like chickens into the pasture of a learning ecosystem.

And as an added benefit, the badge structure creates a market where investors can bet and profit off of who gains badges and to what degree on the model of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin! So all the stability of the pre-crash housing market! What could possibly go wrong!?

Let me be clear – this is the ultimate goal of the school privatization movement.

Charter and voucher schools are only the tip of the iceberg. They still require real human beings to act as teachers (though they need not be as well educated or have as much experience as public school teachers). They still require buildings and grounds.

Then they can pocket all the rest of the money taxpayers put aside to educate children and call it profit.

And they can use the programs students access to “learn” as a way to gather valuable marketing data about our kids. Everything students do on the device is free market research – every word they input, every keystroke, every site visited down to the slightest eye movement.

This is the logical conclusion of the monetization of education and an economy that only sees value in others as human capital that can be bought, sold and exploited.

This is where the privatization movement is going. And they’re laying the groundwork in legislation being proposed in our state capitals today.

Even if school vouchers never take off to the degree necessary to scaffold the most robust learning ecosystems, EdTech lobbyists are trying to install as much of this garbage as they can into our existing schools.

Apparently, many of my students got it for Christmas. Or since there’s a free on-line version, they were turned on to it by others who had gotten the deluxe version as a present.

It started as an undercurrent of trash talk. “You suck at Fortnite.” “You can’t beat me on Fortnite.” “You just wish you could take me on Fortnite.”

And then it started to manifest physically.

Those same kids would come in to school with Fortnite Face – glassy red eyes, heads slumped on the table and the inability to stay awake for more than 10 minutes at a time.

It’s not all of my students, but it’s a significant percentage. Almost all boys. And almost all at a distinct learning disadvantage.

Teaching them is like teaching someone in a deep sea diver suit. They can’t really see or hear you very well. And any message you get back from them sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of the ocean.

Plus I have as many special education students as legally allowed in every class, which requires mountains of extra paperwork and monitoring for each child.

And of course the phone in my room doesn’t call out and the cell reception is terrible, so I have to move to one of the few phones that will actually allow me to contact parents and try to communicate my concerns.

Most parents I talked to noticed the same things I had. Fortnite was taking over their children’s lives. Their kids were playing the game at every opportunity and ignoring most everything else.

However, most parents I couldn’t reach. Those cricket burner phones get disconnected quick. Others go straight to a voicemail box that’s so full it won’t accept new messages. Others allow me to leave a message that will never be returned.

But sometimes I did get through. And sometimes parents didn’t simply throw up their hands and say they don’t know what to do. Sometimes a parent actually laid down ground rules or took the game away.

However, if I’m being honest, contacting parents did not solve my problem.

In general, video games don’t make children more violent. Fortnite is a game where students shoot each other with guns all night long and it hasn’t made my students any more aggressive or violent than they already were.

Many cultures like the Japanese are much more into video games than ours and they have fewer violent incidents or school shootings.

However, video game addiction is a real thing and it impacts learning.

After school, I couldn’t wait to take on the role of plucky plumber Mario or his brother Luigi. I’d jump on a few turtle shells, bounce over a bottomless pit and smash just the right secret brick to get my flashing star power up and wipe the floor with endless levels of Koopa Troopas.

But through it all, I never really learned anything.

With the possible exception of a few Italian stereotypes, the only knowledge I gained was where the warp zones were, which blocks to hit and the muscle memory necessary to defeat the next bad guy.

However, now-a-days that’s all changed.

Someone in marketing and accounting has decided that the same techniques I used to save Princess Toadstool would make an exceptional method of pedagogy.

They call it gamification, the process of making academic lessons, courses and objectives look more like video games.

Sure, the process has applications in the business world and advertising, but its biggest market has been education.

It’s the latest form of snake oil out of the cobra factory, and your teacher may be forced to pour it into your children’s brains.

That’s just Education 2018. Under the old model, the hucksters would have to approach each teacher one-at-a-time and convince them to try the shinny new toy in the box. But when you remove teacher autonomy, that frees all the used car salesmen to go right to the one person in your district – often the technology coordinator or academic coach – who controls the purse strings and convince him or her to buy what they’re selling.

They are good or bad based on the amount of fun they provide the user.

Be honest. No one really cares if Link puts together the Tri-force. No one is losing any sleep over rampaging Metroids on the loose. No one is putting out an Amber Alert the next time Princess Peach is inevitably kidnapped by Bowser. The only thing that matters is if meeting these objectives and countering these fictional bad guys is fun and exciting.

People care whether you can read and write. You may lose sleep over being unable to add, subtract, multiple and divide. Co-workers will be alerted if you don’t comprehend the basics of science and history.

And the higher the skill we’re aiming for, the greater the degree of importance.

After the first few chapters, they weren’t reading for a grade or to please me, their teacher. They truly wanted to know what would happen next. And to fully understand that, they had to exercise and refine their reading skills.

Look at it like this.

When I was playing Super Mario Bros., I often took a few warp zones to the last board so I could beat Bowser quickly and win the game. But that means I skipped over most of the first seven boards.

This didn’t matter because the only reason to play was to win. But if those first boards had included something important to the experience, skipping them would have greatly diminished my experience.

Gamification reduces learning until its meaningless. Why would anyone want to know something unless it carried with it a video game like reward?

And that’s merely the worst part.

In practice, most of the applications and software being pushed on kids to increase enthusiasm and motivation aren’t really very much fun at all. After a few times through, there isn’t much reason to plow through exposition heavy content with little to do. This material doesn’t connect to students’ lives, it doesn’t foster authentic competition, it doesn’t stoke their sense of wonder – it’s just a boring set of hoops to jump through to satisfy the instructor.

Admittedly, it does provide instant feedback, but that doesn’t matter if students don’t care about the matter at hand.

Michael sat at his desk with ear buds inserted, an iPad balanced in front of his eyes and an old fashioned paper book open on his desk.

His head was bopping and weaving. His eyes were transfixed on a YouTube video of an animated soldier blasting away bad guys. And his book was laid out in front of him, largely ignored.

This was during our class’ sustained silent reading time – a period of 15-20 minutes where my 7th grade students were supposed to read self-selected books. Eventually, they’d have to complete a project, but today all they had to do was read.

Still, many used the time the same way as Michael did – lost in cyberspace, merely pretending their eyes gloss over the page.

“And what did the teacher do?” I hear some readers say indignantly.

“If you allow this type of behavior, you’re worse than the child doing it.”

So come with me as I redirect Michael.

“Hey, buddy,” I say.

“Huh?” he responds as if awakened from a dream.

“Are you reading?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“You’re not just watching that video and ignoring your book?”

“Nope,” he says now fully awake. And he proceeds to give me a canned summary of the text that he memorized from the Internet.

But I’m still skeptical.

“I’m going to take your iPad away just for SSR time,” I say.

“BUT WHY!? I’M READING!”

“I just want you to be able to concentrate on what you’re reading.”

And as I gently pry the iPad from his curled fists, he stands up and gives me a look of pure hatred.

This is a look from a 7th grade boy who’s considering violence.

It’s the same look you’d get trying to take away a dog’s bone, or an addict’s crack pipe.

It truly depends on the child what happens next. Some will regain control, slam down into their seats and sulk. Others will whine and cause a scene. And some will lose all control and lash out.

This is what teachers deal with every day when it comes to technology in the classroom.

I’m not qualified to answer the first question (though it deserves much more study than it is receiving). But from my 15 plus years of experience in the classroom, I feel qualified to answer the second – and that answer is often a resounding “NO.”

In my kids’ everyday lives, this type of constant technology reliance doesn’t make them better students. It doesn’t give them access to more information. It makes them dependent on instant gratification and sensory overload.

Their minds are submerged in a soup of constant noise and conflicting demands for their attention. Stringing together thoughts and coming to reasoned opinions becomes increasingly difficult.

This isn’t to say that technology has no place in the classroom.

There are ways to use it that can enhance learning. However, in my experience these are NOT the ways it is being used most of the time. That takes, thought, planning, intention. Instead, many well-meaning administrators or school directors prescribe technology as an end in itself regardless of the goals of an individual lesson. They want to prove their buildings, schools or districts are cutting edge, and that only takes the constant use of technology – not surgical, intentional use.

It’s not that teachers don’t know how to apply it or don’t care. It’s that technology – especially the presence of a one-to-one device in the hands of every child at all (or most) times – creates more problems than it solves.

This is why the same people who invented these technologies strictly regulate them for their own children.

A number of specialty Silicon Valley schools, say Clement and Miles, such as the Waldorf School, rely almost exclusively on low-tech tools to teach. This often means chalkboards and pencils. The emphasis is on learning interpersonal skills such as cooperation and respect – not the ins and outs of computer coding.

At Brightworks School, even the physical environment of the class is a tool to learning. Students attend class in treehouses and kids learn creativity by building things with their hands.

This is a far cry from the technological wonderland our kids are being sold by these kids’ parents.

No one really knows what effect it’s having on growing minds. However, psychologists are beginning to see alarming trends.

For instance, frequent use of social media makes an eighth-grader’s risk for depression 27% higher. Moreover, use of smart phones for at least three hours a day increases children’s risk of becoming suicidal. Some experts believe that increased use of technology has contributed to the teen suicide rate which for the first time eclipses the homicide rate.

There is an unquestioned bias that doing things with technology is somehow better simply because we’re using technology. However, an article written on a computer will not necessarily be better than one written with pen and ink. There are other factors involved.

Now Gates and company are pushing personalized learning objectives. Sometimes called competency based education, these continue to place the device in the center of what should be the student-teacher relationship.

In my own classes, I’ve put the brakes on unquestioned technology. I only use devices, programs or applications that are (1) reliable and (2) when I know why I’m using them.

Even then, I find myself unable to even talk to students without beginning every lesson telling them to at least temporarily put their devices away so they can hear the directions.

Sure, I could give them a QR code to scan and get a written copy of the directions. I could upload a video for them to watch. But that limits direct feedback. It makes it more difficult for them to ask questions. And it makes it almost impossible for me to tell if 20-30 kids are actually doing the assignment before they turn it in for grading.

These are just kids, and like kids in any age they’ll take the path of least resistance. Often they’ll try to get through the assignment as quickly as possible so they can listen to music, or watch a video, or play a video game or chat on-line.